Ultrasound (US) imaging provides useful information about the interior characteristics (e.g., anatomical tissue, material flow, etc.) of a subject under examination. An ultrasound imaging system has included a probe with an ultrasound transducer array, a console, a display, and a keyboard. The transducer array transmits an ultrasound signal into a field of view and receives echoes produced in response to the signal interacting with structure therein. The console controls transmission and reception. The echoes are processed by the console, which generates one or more images indicative of the structure that are visually presented in the display region.
FIG. 1 shows an example image 102 of a sub-portion of a breast of a subject. In particular, the image 102 shows a sub-portion of the breast that includes a mass 104. However, from FIG. 1, the reading clinician would not be apprised of the location within the breast, nor which breast, simply from the image 102. As such, such images have been labeled with a body-marker. For example, the image 102 includes the body-marker 106, which identifies the breast as the left breast by virtue of the shape of the marker 106, with a right end 108 representing a side adjacent the sternum and a left end 110 representing an opposing side adjacent to the shoulder/upper arm. The body-marker 106 further shows a nipple 112 and an areola 114. The illustrated body-marker 106 further includes indicia 116 that shows a location and an orientation of the transducer array.
As illustrated, generally, body-markers such as the body marker 106 attempt to depict a region at or near the scanned region of the body. In general, the user, after generation of the image, views a text based list of available body-marker. The user then selects a body-marker from the list that bests represents the scanned region of the body, and the selected body-marker is overlaid over the image 102. The user then places the graphical indicia 116 with respect to the body marker 102 to provide the clinician with a graphic that shows the approximate location and orientation of the transducer array during data acquisition.
Unfortunately, the body-marker 106 is a two-dimensional (2D) cartoonish like graphic, whereas the actual scanned anatomy is three dimensional. As such, the body-marker 106 does not well-reflect the actual scanned tissue (the mass 104 in the image 102), and the graphical indicia 116 does not well reflect the actual location and orientation of the transducer array during data acquisition.